from Clegglet, Prince of No-Mark

To join, or not to join: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The twists and turns of Mandelson and Gordon
Or to take arms in a dark deal with Cam’ron
And while opposing back him? To lose: to win:
To choose, and by a pact to say we end
The few score seats and by-election shocks
Our party’s heir to: ‘tis a consumation
Devoutly to be missed.

Ejecta Membra

Poet defeats Prelate at Beards: Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williamson came a modest second to ArchPoet Geoffrey Hill at a recent Game of Beards at Keble College.
http://www.keble.ox.ac.uk/news/geoffrey-hill-conference-at-keble/image

                                         ~

While Martin Dolan has supplied this wonderful link:  

http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/2009/05/poets-ranked-by-beard-weight.html

which truly made my teatime.

                                         *

Etruscan carts had metal-rimmed wheels four foot and eight and a half inches apart.

                                         *

 I was asked whether I had watched last night's (the third and final) televised election debate and about the use of 'nowt', subjects that seem intimately if subterraneanly related:

I was too busy bathing my feet after a visit to Eastwood to attend to the debates. In case that first sentence causes puzzlement, not that would ever be my intent, no, I haven't joined a strange cult which indulges in rites of pedicure after entering the shrine (of D.H.Lawrence) but rather I was suffering from the after effects of following around the winding pilgrim trails of the nearby and vast Ikea store where someone was in search of curtain rings.

I was, though, able to get a copy of a volume containing Lawrence's short story 'Delilah and Mr Bircumshaw', which I haven't set eyes on in almost 40 years, from Eastwood's Public  Library. I like visiting those old colliery villages round there : people's eyes light up when they hear my surname, as with the librarian today: 'I used to know an old gentleman with that name'.

People in much of the North Midlands used to say variants of 'nowt' too, 'naht' and the like. Although a relic, it still happens sometimes in speech, language being a haunted house par excellence. And, despite the dull accounts of linguists, people, being actors, instinctive mimics like most primates, will use inflections other than their own.

A Modeft Propofal

I consider it would be a fine thing, a truly experimental and innovative thing, if there were a moratorium on the publication of new poetry for, say, five years. Or even just twelve months for a test run. By publication I mean anything in print, the internet OR read in public. The question of private circulation would require some careful deliberation and refinement of definition: there are always going to be those who have compulsions to share their latest with their cat, or house-plants, or mother. Although this would probably have to be a voluntary arrangement it would be exciting if official support could be won and transgression of the discipline of silence could incur a suitable sanction, such as enforced indexing of European Community Food Policy Directives or public dismemberment joint by joint in an art exhibition (while being maintained alive for the longest possible period to endure the even more excruciating pain of the other installations).

The benefits of this temporary trappisme of poetry would be immense: all those counterfeit versifiers who exist solely to torture their audiences through the amplification system of egotism would evanesce and vanish quite, absolutely and utterly, imagine the global deflation of wind-bags that would ensue, we could probably supply the energy needs of the Third World with the hot air saved, while, as there would be no strictures against re-publication, we would have ample opportunity to assemble retrospectives and collected works, reputations could be thoughtfully and fastidiously interrogated, perhaps people would begin to remember how to read, other than if scanning a newspaper, and most of all there would be restoration of poets to what should be their true proving ground: the blank solitude of the page.

Football long after Picasso

On Jerome Rothenberg's wondrous blog, 'Poems and Poetics', at http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/, for Sunday, January 24th, 2010, to be savoured, to be treasured even with grubby fingers is Akira Tatehata: Seven Poems, with a note in praise of  (translated from Japanese by Hiroaki Sato) .
Even in translation, even in prose, it is that rare shock of authentic poetry, coming from the sidelines in this age of ersatz.

Sol, companion of El.

Unlike most of the stars in the galaxy, our sun is a solitary, as alone as the unnameable El became, after he subduced himself from the Babylonian pantheon. Until now...

...it is reckoned that Sol's lost siblings should have remained on a similar circular orbit about the galaxy and, although the birth cluster dissippated about 4.6 billion years ago, with the launch of GAIA in 2012 it should be possible to identify 10 to 60 of such stars and thereby isolate details of solitary Sol's birthplace, its whereabouts and size:

"in a March 2009, draft pre-print, a computational astrophysicist argued that the chemical abundances found in the Solar System and the observed structure of the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt constrain the initial mass and radius of Sol's star cluster of birth to between 500 and 3,000 Solar-masses (distributed among an estimated 1,500 to 3,500 stars) within a radius of 5 light-years (1.5 parsecs). Although the cluster dissolved over the past 4.6 billion years with the dispersal of the Sun's sibling stars into the surrounding the Milky Way, the stars should have remained on a similar orbit around the galactic center. While Sol's siblings now lie hidden among many millions of stars, 10 to 60 such stars should still be orbiting the galactic core within a distance of 300 light-years (100 parsecs). With the launch of the European Space Agency's GAIA astrometry mission now scheduled for 2012 (to gather positional and radial velocity measurements for a billion stars within five years and create a 3-dimensional galactic chart of the Milky Way), these sibling stars can be identified with accurate measurements of their level of heavy elements as well as positions and velocities of their motion within the galaxy, and the discovery of even a few such siblings should strongly constrain the original size and location of Sol's birth cluster (Simon P. Portegies Zwart, Scientific American, November 2009, pp. 40-47; and Simon P. Portegies Zwart, 2009). "

http://www.solstation.com/stars/sol.htm

The Dalkey Archive

The Dalkey Archive by Flann O'Brien



My rating: 4 of 5 stars

O'Brien, but possibly not De Selby, would appreciate how I came to re-read this: I was in a pound shop, as we call them in Britain, when among the batteries that exhaust in a day and the year-old crisps, I beheld, I think that's the right verb for the occasion, a whole row of this book, without companions.

I had to buy one, even if it cost me a quid.



In the name of A Bash in the Tunnel and the Third Policeman



Amen



View all my reviews >>

Black Annis

From First Flights (pub. posthumously 1797) by John Heyrick Jnr

(this curiosity is generally credited with putting flesh on the bones of the Leicester legend of Black Annis, although some believe it has much older roots. The author was a Lieutenant in the dragoons and his book of mainly occasional verses was published just at the time of his early death.  He was of the same family as the 17th century poets Robert Herrick and Thomas Heyrick. Many of the author's poems are addressed to young ladies, although mainly slightly older ones than the diminutive putative enquirer who occasioned this.)


ON A CAVE CALLED BLACK ANNIS'S BOWER


(being an answer to a very young lady's enquiries about the story of Black Annis)



Where down the plain the winding pathway falls,

From Glenn-field vill, to Lester's anceint walls,

Nature, or Art, with imitative power,

Far in the Glenn has plac'd Black Annis' Bower.



An oak, the pride of all the mossy dell,

Spreads his broad arms above the stony cell;

And many a bush, with hostile thorns array'd,

Forbids the secret cavern to invade;

Whilst delving vales each way meander round,

And violet banks with redolence abound.



Here, if the uncouth song of former days,

Soil not the page with Falsehood's artful lays,

Black Annis held her solitary reign,

The dread and wonder of the neighb'ring plain.



The Shepherd griev'd to view his waning flock,

And trac'd the fistlings to the gloomy rock.

No vagrant children cull'd the flowerets then,

For infant blood oft stain'd the gory den.

Not Sparta Mount* for infant tears renown'd,

Echo'd more frequently the piteous sound.

Oft the gaunt Maid the frantic Mother curs'd,

Whom Britan's wolf with savage nipple nurs'd;

Whilst Lester's sons behld aghast the scene,

Nor dar'd to meet the Monster of the Green.



'Tis said the soul of mortal man recoil'd

To view Black Annis' eye, so fierce and wild;

Vast talons, foul with human flesh, there grew

In place of hands, and features livid blue

Glar'd in her visage; whilst her obscene waist,

Warm skins of human victims close embrac'd.



But Time, than Man more certain, tho' more slow,

At length 'gainst Annis drew his sable bow;

The great decree the pious Shepherds bless'd,

And general joy the general fear confess'd.



Not without terror they the cave survey,

Where hung the monstrous trophies of her sway:

'Tis said, that in the rock large rooms were found,

Scoop'd with her claws beneath the flinty ground;

In these the swains her hated body threw,



But left the entrance still to future view,

That the children's children might the tale rehearse,

And bards record it in their tuneful verse.





But in these listless days, the idle bard

Gives to the wind all themes of cold regard;

Forgive, then, if in rough, unpolished song,

An unskilled swain the dying tale prolong.

And you, ye Fair, whom Nature's scenes delight,

If Annis' Bower your vagrant steps invite,

Ere the bright sun Aurora's car suceed,

Or dewy evening quench the thirsty mead,

Forbear with chilling censures to refuse

Some gen'rous tribute to the rustic muse.

A violet or common daisy throw,

Such gifts as Maro's lovely nymphs bestow;

Then shall your Bard survive the critic's frown,

And in your smiles enjoy his best renown.